The Pakistanisation of Indonesia

Over the last few years, Jakarta has laid down legal infrastructure that discriminates against religious minorities, allowing Islamists to take the law into their own hands

The marble minaret of Jakartaâ€™s largest mosque, the Istiqlal, and the cast iron steeples of the cityâ€™s Catholic Cathedral, jointly punctuate the city-centreâ€™s skyline. The adjacent location of these two places of worship is a powerful, sensory manifestation of Indonesiaâ€™s multi-religious and tolerant ethos.

Indonesia is the worldâ€™s most populous Muslim country. Although around 87 per cent of the population, or 210 million Indonesians, self-identify as Muslims, the nation is a tapestry of religions from Hinduism and Christianity to Confucianism and Animism. Scan any newspaper and the names that pop up â€” Teddy Anwar, Suryadharma Ali, Veronica Colondam â€” confirm the syncretism that has long defined this part of the world.

As a Muslim-majority, democratic republic, whose constitution guarantees the right of citizens to freedom of religious belief and practice, Indonesia is a rare creature. The U.S.-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation, awarded Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono a high-profile prize for promoting tolerance just last month. The country is, moreover, regularly feted by world leaders, as a beacon of moderate Islam and a model for the Muslim world.

And yet only a few dozen kilometres east of Jakarta, in the suburb of Bekasi, a group of 18 Ahmadis has been holed up inside a fenced-off mosque for over two months. They barricaded themselves inside in early April, after local police sealed it, placing locks on the entrances and erecting a fence of corrugated metal sheets.

They refuse to come out until the mosque is allowed to reopen and serve as a place of prayer for the areaâ€™s 400-odd Ahmadis. Until then, their only contact with the outside world is through a square slat that opens in a back door to the mosque. It is through this opening that food is passed to them and through which they talk daily with Mohammad Iqbal, the leader of the congregation, about his attempts to secure redress. All efforts, he says, have so far failed.

Outside the mosque, a local government-planted hoarding refers to a number of anti-Ahmaddiya decrees and resolutions passed by religious and central governmental authorities.

Intolerance since 2005

In 2005, the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), a coalition of Muslim organisations, issued a fatwa condemning the Ahmaddiya community as religiously â€œdeviant.â€ Mohammad Iqbal dates the start of his communitiesâ€™ problems to that year, with some members receiving threatening text messages on their mobile phones.

But the real harassment began later, after 2008. That year, President Yudhoyono signed off on a decree issued jointly by the Religious Affairs Ministry, Home Ministry and Attorney General, which ordered the Ahmaddiya community to stop all activities that â€œpropagatedâ€ its beliefs. The vagueness of the decreeâ€™s wording has emboldened some regional governments to interpret the law as an outright ban on the practice of the Ahmadiyya faith.

The Ahmadis are not the only ones to have fallen victim to growing intolerance. On a recent evening in Jakarta, this reporter spent several hours talking with victims of religious violence and discrimination from across the country. Their complaints ranged from administrative inconveniences, to intimidation, violence and even murder at the hand of hard line Sunni Muslims. The vast majority of Indonesiaâ€™s Muslims are Sunni.

Muhammad Zaini, a 22-year-old Shia from Madura, in East Java, spoke of 600-odd Shias being forced out of their homes from two villages in the area, when a 200-strong mob of Sunni Muslims attacked their homes in August 2012. Several houses were burnt down and Zainiâ€™s paternal uncle was killed. The Shias are currently camped out in a refugee camp in a sports stadium. Local Sunni authorities have issued edicts against allowing their return.

Permits for churches

Reverend Palti Panjaitan, of the HKBP-Filadelfia protestant church, talked about the seven churches in the Bekasi area (where Ahmaddiyas were also under attack) that had been forcibly closed or demolished by local authorities since 2005. Christian congregations across the country have been having a difficult time in recent years securing permits for the construction of churches. There are an estimated 22 million Christians in Indonesia, comprising over nine per cent of the population.

Dian Jennie, a believer of the indigenous Javanese religion, Sapta Darma, elaborated the routine harassment faced by faiths not part of the six officially recognised religions of Indonesia: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Confucianism. Mandatory state-issued identity cards for all adult citizens that list the holderâ€™s religion, leave a blank space for those who donâ€™t agree to be classified under any of the official religions. Citizens with blank spaces on their IDs are often pilloried as godless. Their children find it difficult to gain admission to schools and even getting their marriages registered can be impossible.

â€œWhat we are seeing,â€ says Andreas Harsono, an activist journalist and researcher for Human Rights Watch, â€œis a creeping Pakistanisation of Indonesia.â€ Harsono claims that like Indonesia, Pakistan too, was a relatively tolerant country until the 1970s. But the situation changed dramatically in the 1980s, one clear manifestation of this shift being Islamabadâ€™s 1984 anti-Ahmaddiya ordinance.

In Indonesia, the authoritarian regime of General Suharto from 1967-1998, had largely kept religionâ€™s role in politics under check. Following the transition to democracy, however, Islamist political parties have been allowed to play an open, legal role in politics. Radical civil society groups operating outside the formal political system have also grown in size and influence. The latter include the notorious Front Pembela Islam, an organisation that was set up in 1998 with support from government security agencies and whose goons use Islamic edicts to justify vigilante actions against bars and nightclubs, as well as Christian churches and the mosques of so-called apostates like Ahmadiyyas and Shias.

More discrimination

â€œOver the last eight years the government has basically laid down the legal infrastructure which discriminates against religious minorities,â€ claims Harsono. This allows Islamists to take the law into their own hands, while the police look the other way. He gives as examples a 2006 decree that has made it harder to obtain permits to build houses of worship for minorities, and an increasingly cavalier use of a 1965 blasphemy law.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Religious Affairs, Mr. Zubaidi, dusts off such accusations. He admits that Indonesia has â€œsmall (religious) conflicts in a limited area. But we are a big country and despite everything, we maintain our unity.â€ He claims that at the level of policy, matters are improving, rather than deteriorating for religious minorities. He fails, however, to elaborate when pressed. He does agree that on â€œa social levelâ€ there might be some cause for concern regarding increasing intolerance.

It is true that for the moment at least, Indonesia is a far cry from Pakistan. The most popular face of Islam in the country is still the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the countryâ€™s (and the worldâ€™s) largest Muslim social organisation with 70 million members. The NU was founded in 1926 and has always defended a moderate and culturally rooted approach to Islam, in open opposition to more fundamentalist Wahabist interpretations. Islamist political parties have yet to win a single general election. In fact their showing at the polls has been worsening in the years since 1998.

Imam Pituduh, a member of the NUâ€™s secretariat, looks more like a rock star than a cleric, with dark shoulder-length hair, shot through with silver, hanging loose about his face. He says the NU believes Islam in Indonesia can only survive by accepting its admixture with local traditions. NU imams, for example, use local beliefs in astrology to help decide on the names of newborns. â€œThe real Islam is what we represent not what Wahabis claim,â€ he says. The imam is confident that â€œthe peopleâ€ of Indonesia will reject radicalism since it is not a part of their traditions.

Perhaps, but it is also a fact that religionâ€™s role in Indonesian society has been growing. A new education bill is about to double the number of hours devoted to religious education in elementary schools at the expense of science classes. A new criminal code under discussion is proposing harsh punishments for couples who live together before marriage, and increasing the maximum prison term for adultery to five years from the current nine months. According to the Setara Institute, a non-governmental organisation that monitors religious freedoms, 264 cases of violent attacks on religious minorities took place in 2012, up from 216 in 2010.

Andreas Harsono remains deeply concerned. â€œOnce you allow religion to pervade politics and society, it becomes very difficult to undo it in an Islamic context,â€ he concludes.

Over the last few years, Jakarta has laid down legal infrastructure that discriminates against religious minorities, allowing Islamists to take the law into their own hands ..................

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vishwasrupa-ji , thanks for the informative article - i once lived inthe region and anyhing from there is of interest ... i still maintain contacts with christians in the region adn hope to report back to this forum about the actual situation on the ground , many thanks .

Islamization (hardline) appears to be global trend. I am yet to find a country that has escaped this trend; except for Burma, where the religion of peace is being kept under check.

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there are still even today at least two countries to the best of my knowledge which still practice a peaceful form of islam , they are brunei and malaysia and arguably various parts of indonesia - i hope the article refers only to official policy and not what is happening on a people to people basis on the ground.

i do ownder why you quoted burma , after all they are by no means a muslim country ? theyre Buddhist arent they ?

there are still even today at least two countries to the best of my knowledge which still practice a peaceful form of islam , they are brunei and malaysia and arguably various parts of indonesia - i hope the article refers only to official policy and not what is happening on a people to people basis on the ground.

i do ownder why you quoted burma , after all they are by no means a muslim country ? theyre Buddhist arent they ?

Islam is like a timebomb in the hands of the illiterate and the poorly educated young men in these Muslim countries.

I have never seen a religion where it is so easy to whip up mass hysteria.
Any religious leader can whip up a bunch of muslim youth to kill or attack a minority community.

I think what differentiates Islam from other religions is that fascist attitude that they have towards people that dont share their beliefs.
"You are a Kaffir - which means i can do whatever i want to you and God is still on my side".

It is this attitude that makes Islamic countries always try to intimidate minority communities and turn them in 3rd class citizens.
The few Muslims that challenge this narrative of supremacy are pilloried or made into outcasts.

Over the last few years, Jakarta has laid down legal infrastructure that discriminates against religious minorities, allowing Islamists to take the law into their own hands

The marble minaret of Jakartaâ€™s largest mosque, the Istiqlal, and the cast iron steeples of the cityâ€™s Catholic Cathedral, jointly punctuate the city-centreâ€™s skyline. The adjacent location of these two places of worship is a powerful, sensory manifestation of Indonesiaâ€™s multi-religious and tolerant ethos.

Indonesia is the worldâ€™s most populous Muslim country. Although around 87 per cent of the population, or 210 million Indonesians, self-identify as Muslims, the nation is a tapestry of religions from Hinduism and Christianity to Confucianism and Animism. Scan any newspaper and the names that pop up â€” Teddy Anwar, Suryadharma Ali, Veronica Colondam â€” confirm the syncretism that has long defined this part of the world.

As a Muslim-majority, democratic republic, whose constitution guarantees the right of citizens to freedom of religious belief and practice, Indonesia is a rare creature. The U.S.-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation, awarded Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono a high-profile prize for promoting tolerance just last month. The country is, moreover, regularly feted by world leaders, as a beacon of moderate Islam and a model for the Muslim world.

And yet only a few dozen kilometres east of Jakarta, in the suburb of Bekasi, a group of 18 Ahmadis has been holed up inside a fenced-off mosque for over two months. They barricaded themselves inside in early April, after local police sealed it, placing locks on the entrances and erecting a fence of corrugated metal sheets.

They refuse to come out until the mosque is allowed to reopen and serve as a place of prayer for the areaâ€™s 400-odd Ahmadis. Until then, their only contact with the outside world is through a square slat that opens in a back door to the mosque. It is through this opening that food is passed to them and through which they talk daily with Mohammad Iqbal, the leader of the congregation, about his attempts to secure redress. All efforts, he says, have so far failed.

Outside the mosque, a local government-planted hoarding refers to a number of anti-Ahmaddiya decrees and resolutions passed by religious and central governmental authorities.

Intolerance since 2005

In 2005, the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), a coalition of Muslim organisations, issued a fatwa condemning the Ahmaddiya community as religiously â€œdeviant.â€ Mohammad Iqbal dates the start of his communitiesâ€™ problems to that year, with some members receiving threatening text messages on their mobile phones.

But the real harassment began later, after 2008. That year, President Yudhoyono signed off on a decree issued jointly by the Religious Affairs Ministry, Home Ministry and Attorney General, which ordered the Ahmaddiya community to stop all activities that â€œpropagatedâ€ its beliefs. The vagueness of the decreeâ€™s wording has emboldened some regional governments to interpret the law as an outright ban on the practice of the Ahmadiyya faith.

The Ahmadis are not the only ones to have fallen victim to growing intolerance. On a recent evening in Jakarta, this reporter spent several hours talking with victims of religious violence and discrimination from across the country. Their complaints ranged from administrative inconveniences, to intimidation, violence and even murder at the hand of hard line Sunni Muslims. The vast majority of Indonesiaâ€™s Muslims are Sunni.

Muhammad Zaini, a 22-year-old Shia from Madura, in East Java, spoke of 600-odd Shias being forced out of their homes from two villages in the area, when a 200-strong mob of Sunni Muslims attacked their homes in August 2012. Several houses were burnt down and Zainiâ€™s paternal uncle was killed. The Shias are currently camped out in a refugee camp in a sports stadium. Local Sunni authorities have issued edicts against allowing their return.

Permits for churches

Reverend Palti Panjaitan, of the HKBP-Filadelfia protestant church, talked about the seven churches in the Bekasi area (where Ahmaddiyas were also under attack) that had been forcibly closed or demolished by local authorities since 2005. Christian congregations across the country have been having a difficult time in recent years securing permits for the construction of churches. There are an estimated 22 million Christians in Indonesia, comprising over nine per cent of the population.

Dian Jennie, a believer of the indigenous Javanese religion, Sapta Darma, elaborated the routine harassment faced by faiths not part of the six officially recognised religions of Indonesia: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Confucianism. Mandatory state-issued identity cards for all adult citizens that list the holderâ€™s religion, leave a blank space for those who donâ€™t agree to be classified under any of the official religions. Citizens with blank spaces on their IDs are often pilloried as godless. Their children find it difficult to gain admission to schools and even getting their marriages registered can be impossible.

â€œWhat we are seeing,â€ says Andreas Harsono, an activist journalist and researcher for Human Rights Watch, â€œis a creeping Pakistanisation of Indonesia.â€ Harsono claims that like Indonesia, Pakistan too, was a relatively tolerant country until the 1970s. But the situation changed dramatically in the 1980s, one clear manifestation of this shift being Islamabadâ€™s 1984 anti-Ahmaddiya ordinance.

In Indonesia, the authoritarian regime of General Suharto from 1967-1998, had largely kept religionâ€™s role in politics under check. Following the transition to democracy, however, Islamist political parties have been allowed to play an open, legal role in politics. Radical civil society groups operating outside the formal political system have also grown in size and influence. The latter include the notorious Front Pembela Islam, an organisation that was set up in 1998 with support from government security agencies and whose goons use Islamic edicts to justify vigilante actions against bars and nightclubs, as well as Christian churches and the mosques of so-called apostates like Ahmadiyyas and Shias.

More discrimination

â€œOver the last eight years the government has basically laid down the legal infrastructure which discriminates against religious minorities,â€ claims Harsono. This allows Islamists to take the law into their own hands, while the police look the other way. He gives as examples a 2006 decree that has made it harder to obtain permits to build houses of worship for minorities, and an increasingly cavalier use of a 1965 blasphemy law.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Religious Affairs, Mr. Zubaidi, dusts off such accusations. He admits that Indonesia has â€œsmall (religious) conflicts in a limited area. But we are a big country and despite everything, we maintain our unity.â€ He claims that at the level of policy, matters are improving, rather than deteriorating for religious minorities. He fails, however, to elaborate when pressed. He does agree that on â€œa social levelâ€ there might be some cause for concern regarding increasing intolerance.

It is true that for the moment at least, Indonesia is a far cry from Pakistan. The most popular face of Islam in the country is still the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the countryâ€™s (and the worldâ€™s) largest Muslim social organisation with 70 million members. The NU was founded in 1926 and has always defended a moderate and culturally rooted approach to Islam, in open opposition to more fundamentalist Wahabist interpretations. Islamist political parties have yet to win a single general election. In fact their showing at the polls has been worsening in the years since 1998.

Imam Pituduh, a member of the NUâ€™s secretariat, looks more like a rock star than a cleric, with dark shoulder-length hair, shot through with silver, hanging loose about his face. He says the NU believes Islam in Indonesia can only survive by accepting its admixture with local traditions. NU imams, for example, use local beliefs in astrology to help decide on the names of newborns. â€œThe real Islam is what we represent not what Wahabis claim,â€ he says. The imam is confident that â€œthe peopleâ€ of Indonesia will reject radicalism since it is not a part of their traditions.

Perhaps, but it is also a fact that religionâ€™s role in Indonesian society has been growing. A new education bill is about to double the number of hours devoted to religious education in elementary schools at the expense of science classes. A new criminal code under discussion is proposing harsh punishments for couples who live together before marriage, and increasing the maximum prison term for adultery to five years from the current nine months. According to the Setara Institute, a non-governmental organisation that monitors religious freedoms, 264 cases of violent attacks on religious minorities took place in 2012, up from 216 in 2010.

Andreas Harsono remains deeply concerned. â€œOnce you allow religion to pervade politics and society, it becomes very difficult to undo it in an Islamic context,â€ he concludes.

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Why not so called preachers go in muslim majority country and teach(converts) people to teach whats original religion is

Please have a look at this & then you can do some googling about "Rohingya Muslims in Burma"

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pardon , - i had mis-read your earlier post - yes i have been aware of the plight of the rohingyas way before this thread started - but i think most people on this forum would agree with me that that is hardly the way to solve anything - but it is good that you have pointed that example out - thanks for the reminder that it can also happen the other way around - which is equally wrong !

Majority Muslims=muslim country
.
And if they are not as unlucky as Turkey, the can truly implement Islam in their lives,!

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Unlucky? Look at Turkey! 98% of the population is Muslim by faith and still they are modern and rational enough to differentiate between where it is religion and where it is human intervention of whims. They are a developed country, though now thanks to Erdogan, on the path of radicalization and Arabization by needlessly butting in an Arab-Jew conflict which has nothing to do with Turks.

Look at yourself. You have been the Thekedaar of Islam for the last 6 decades. What has it got you? Your minorities have almost disappeared, you massacred us Buddhists and now Hindus are on the verge of being finished off as they flee and come into India as refugees. Next will be Sikhs who are even smaller than Hindus in population.

After that islamization is complete then what?

Then whom will you kill?

Let me guess, you will then attack Shiites, Ahmadis and Ismailis.. impose Sunni ideology on them through harsh means.

Once they are also converted or erased, then who will you kill?

See this madness has to stop. Otherwise one day it will consume you...not only that, it will antagonize other cultures against Islam and Muslims needlessly.

Why do you seek so much bloodshed and violence?

World peace is not just a word; it has to be applied with efforts, initiatives and hard work.

It is very unfortunate that you lament Turkey rather than Pakistan, Saudi and Afghanistan of which the first and the last countries are almost on the verge of self-destruction through 'true implementation' of what you ask.

Let me guess, you will then attack Shiites, Ahmadis and Ismailis.. impose Sunni ideology on them through harsh means.

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They are already doing it through PA, Sipah-e-Saheba, etc. since last 2 decades.

Anyway, reasoning out with a madrassa-educated jihadi Paki Mulla, would hardly be useful. These wretched creatures, scum of the earth are getting a taste of their own medicine; basically, what they justifiably deserve. Regular Drone-strikes, suicide bombings, sectarian violence, absolute lawlessness, & a bankrupt exchequor, witnessed silently by a sold-out, destitute, emasculated Pak Army.

One cannot instill any sense in them. These extremists are meant to be doomed. Now, their PM is begging for Power to us & as usual, we would show mercy on these creatures, since their days are numbered, anyway.

I have mentioned several times in this thread, Pakistan's troubles are because of their Islam-obsession. There is absolutely no other reason. Pakistan has become such a cesspool solely because of their Islam-madness and crazed obsession.

Of course, Pakis will never agree and they will keep trying to implement "purer and purer" forms of Islam. Just look at the response of the Paki on this thread. Good for us. Their attitude will hasten their destruction as a nation.

I have mentioned several times in this thread, Pakistan's troubles are because of their Islam-obsession. There is absolutely no other reason. Pakistan has become such a cesspool solely because of their Islam-madness and crazed obsession.

Of course, Pakis will never agree and they will keep trying to implement "purer and purer" forms of Islam. Just look at the response of the Paki on this thread. Good for us. Their attitude will hasten their destruction as a nation.

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The funny thing about organized religion is that too much of it can destroy a country.